youtube is plagued with these bots that either copy someone else’s comment (normally positive of the video creator in order to avoid being auto deleted) or use some chatbot to come up with phrases, the picture is always some attractive woman or sometimes just straight up images from porn, when you click on the profile the banner image or profile links will contain a link to either a scam site or an onlyfans page. They generally also bot upvotes on their comments in order to get better visibility

Ok, as someone who was genuinely interested in Scandinavian history during the Viking Age, this one pisses me off more than it should, we know the vikings at BARE MINIMUM LEVEL OF CONTACT traded with people who traded with the Arabs, we know this because several viking hoards have been discovered with Arab coins.

Additionally, the Viking era came about because the vikings had (generally) better boats than other countries at the time, and those boats could traverse both river and sea, allowing them to trade over great distance.

There’s a ton of other stuff I wont go into about the steel (which, by the way, was not damascus, nobody who spent any time learning about it would claim so), the broad terminology of “vikings”, and the Ulfbert sword, maybe I’ll come back some day and type it out, but I just don’t have the time or energy to write an essay right now

Star forts existing despite their expensive construction because they are superior to other fort designs in the age of gunpowder due to their overlapping zones of fire and safe zones for defenders? No! Clearly its because we have aquatic ancestors with melon glands and long skulls that bread us into slaves by removing said melon glands! And we hid their skulls there! In some of the most interesting and eye catching structures to see! You know, to not draw attention to them!

I legitimately do not get the logic here.

That’s a smart solution, I’ll have to look into trying it on my work PC (where they force me to use windows 11), thank you for the recommend!

Windows 11 introduced start menu ads recently in update KB5036980, thankfully they can disabled, but I’m not 100% sure it will stay that way

relevant article from The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/24/24138949/microsoft-windows-11-start-menu-ads-recommendations-setting-disable

Alright, I looked at the poll, its DEEPLY flawed, firstly there were only 875 (434 men, 429 women, which only adds up to 863, with no other gender options listed as responding, where are the remaining 12 people?) respondents, that is an absurdly low sample size for all voters across all states, secondly, the responders aren’t indicative of the general population, 598 (~71%) of the people who responded to the mentioned question were white while only 241 (~28%) of the respondents were any other race, according to census.gov, the percentage of ‘White alone, non-Hispanic’ population as of 2020 is 57%.

There are other issues I don’t have time to go into, like that they mainly collected data from phone calls and that they aren’t listing the distribution of respondents across states, but all in all I would not use this poll to draw any conclusions, and the article being titled like that is at the very least being disingenuous if not actively malicious in order to generate clicks/impressions

Lol welcome aboard the DF party ship!

I still remember my most recent fortress mode cyclops, even though its been almost half a year. I had 2 squads who I had been training using training spears, but forgot to change equipment before sending them to kill it, by some miracle, they dodged all of its attacks for about 20 attacks despite having no dodge skills at all, then one of them either punched or bashed the cyclops in the face and got lucky, knocking it out. What followed was around 20 in game days of a circle of 14 dwarves mercilessly beating a puddle of bruises that was once a cyclops, as training weapons do next to no damage, occasionally it would wake up, then immediately give in to the pain again, with the only non bruise damage coming from whenever a dwarf would decide to punch, kick, or bite instead of using their main weapon. It FINALLY ended when one of dwarves punched it in the head, tearing the brain through the skull, putting the poor thing out of its misery.

My dwarves went in competent speardwarves and came out around grand master level, all very dehydrated.

Yeah but its great! Best book game ive ever read!

No. There are hundreds of entirely valid reasons to be wary of AI, especially the fact that the word AI has just turned into a corporate buzzword, when I hear that (insert thing) has had AI added to it, that can mean anything from a single static image that was made using “AI art” , to a large language model being used, or maybe they just grafted chatGPT to it.

Maybe if people and companies stopped labeling everything even tangentially computer related as AI I’d be less dismissive of it, but as it is now, whenever “AI” is mentioned in relation to a product it feels like a “corp wants to artificially increase percieved value by using latest trend” moment

A lot, as in a large amount, its hard to put a finite number on something like a large part of a large community I am not a part of nor interested in.

I am not the only one who has noticed this, here is a skit video from 4 moths ago demonstrating this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTBCzH1UyNY

As for sources there are TONS, it takes 5 seconds of googling to find a whole page, including:

https://medium.com/illuminations-mirror/where-are-the-nft-bros-c6571ba4f1fd

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhochberg/2023/03/18/at-sxsw-it-was-goodbye-nfts-and-hello-ai-music/?sh=5f3e442e54c6

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-crypto-bros-are-coming-for-ai-2023-12

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582772/chatgpt-ai-get-rich-quick-schemes-hustlers-web

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/ai-generative-art-trend

Hell, just open one of the NFT marketplaces like opensea, I went to the art tab and the top trending is AI “art”

Also, a large amount of those NFT bros have lately been pushing to allow AI companies to steal artist’s works and otherwise generally licking big AI companies’ collective boot, so not exactly a great look for the future of the industry

Also NAL, but it seems like they aren’t arguing for server functionality but rather just the ability to play offline at all, which opens up the third option of requiring games to be patched to remove sever requirements if being shut down, in any case this will be a fascinating case to follow, and I hope they go through with the lawsuit.

Personally, I really enjoy Obsidian ( obsidian.md ), its been fantastic for my notetaking on my PC.

Now, I will admit I haven’t tried it myself but it can apparently work on Synology, so that might be an alternative. Best of luck finding one!

Exactly! I’d put money on a group abusing it, admitting to abusing it, and the game devs still being charged in the near future.

That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.

The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other “users” won’t have to pay to install the game!

There’s literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed